What are User Events and how do I use them?

User Events are the digital footprints left by your visitors as they navigate your website. They represent specific interactions, like clicking a Free Trial button, downloading a PDF, or reaching a specific milestone in your app, that help you measure engagement and understand the customer journey.

When creating an event, it is vital to Add a Description that briefly explains what the event tracks. This description serves a massive purpose beyond simply keeping your internal team aligned. It is specifically used to explain the context of the visitor behavior directly to the AI engine. The AI actively reads this description to understand exactly where the visitor is within their overall user journey. By grasping this critical context, the AI uses this precise information when generating automated nurture emails. This ensures your AI generated communications feel incredibly personalized, highly relevant, and perfectly timed to the actual steps the visitor just took on your site.


What is the purpose of User Events?

While standard tracking tells you who a lead is, User Events tell you what they are doing. By tracking these specific actions, you can:

  • Monitor the User Journey: See exactly which steps a lead took before converting.
  • Gauge Engagement: Identify which features or calls to action are driving the most interest.
  • Optimize Conversions: Compare different event paths to see where your funnel is strongest.
  • Trigger Automations: Use an event as a Rule trigger to send data to your CRM, post a message to Slack, or fire a custom Webhook.

How do I set up a User Event?

You can define and manage your events directly within the Bread and Butter dashboard:

  • Navigate to Automation: Go to the Custom User Event tab.
  • Create New: Click the Create New button to define a new event.
  • Assign an Event Code: Give the event a unique ID, such as trial_click  . This code is what you will use in your shortcodes, code snippets, or API to trigger the action.
  • Customize the Display: Choose an Event Name and an Event Color. This ensures the event is easily identifiable when it appears on your Insights Dashboard and individual Lead timelines.
  • Add a Description: Briefly explain what the event tracks. The AI uses this specific description to understand exactly where the visitor is in their user journey, and it actively uses this vital information when generating highly targeted nurture emails to ensure the messaging is perfectly relevant to their current stage.

Managing and Prioritizing Your User Events

Once your events are created, you have full control over how they appear and how they are weighted within your analytics.

  • Organize by Importance: You can easily drag and drop your events to change their display order. We highly recommend placing your most critical or latest stage events at the very top of the list. For example, if a visitor hits your pricing page and then your contact us page, the contact us event is a much stronger signal of a warm lead. By moving that event to the top, you prioritize the most impactful interactions in your journey summaries.
  • Manage AI Generated Events: When your account is first created, our AI automatically generates a series of common user events to get you started. You can edit these to match your specific goals or make them inactive if you do not want them appearing in your journey summaries. Just like your custom events, these should be organized with the most important, high intent actions at the top of your list.

How do I trigger an event on my website?

Once an event is created and enabled in your dashboard, you can trigger it directly within your WordPress site, through a standard website integration using our JavaScript Library, or by using the Bread and Butter Client API.

WordPress Integration If your website is built on WordPress, implementing these triggers is incredibly straightforward and does not require a developer. You can easily add tracking to your pages and posts by using our dedicated shortcodes.

  • Triggering an Event on Page Load

    If you want to track when a user simply views a specific piece of content, you can generate an event automatically the exact moment the page loads. You have two incredibly simple options for setting this up:

    • Via the Webapp: The absolute fastest method is to simply select "On page load" from the trigger dropdown menu when you are first creating or editing the User Event directly within your main Bread and Butter dashboard, and then selecting or entering the exact URL of the page you want to track.
    • Via Shortcode: Alternatively, you can drop a quick shortcode directly onto any specific page, ensuring you specify your exact event code: [breadbutter-customevent event=event_code /]  

  • Triggering an Event from a Button Click

    You can quickly and easily add a custom button to your page that automatically generates a user event the exact moment it is clicked. Simply use the following shortcode structure:

    [breadbutter-customevent-button css_class="custom" event="your_event"]button[/breadbutter-customevent-button]  

    In this example, the word "button" right before the closing tag represents the actual display label of your button on the page, meaning you can set this text to absolutely anything you want. You must specify your exact event code, and you also have the option to seamlessly apply your own CSS class to perfectly match your site design.

    Advanced Routing and Callbacks for Buttons

    You can easily specify a dedicated callback function or a custom redirect URL to control exactly what happens after the user clicks the button.

    • To add a redirect URL:[breadbutter-customevent-button css_class="custom" event="your_event" redirect="http://www.yoursite.com/page"]button[/breadbutter-customevent-button]  
    • To add a callback function:[breadbutter-customevent-button css_class="custom" event="your_event" callback="runFunction"]button[/breadbutter-customevent-button]  

Alternatively, if you are building your pages using the WordPress block editor, you can use our custom tracking blocks. This visual approach allows you to seamlessly drop an event trigger onto any page element so you can track specific visitor actions by simply configuring the block settings right from your WordPress admin panel.


Other Website Integrations

For websites not using WordPress, you can utilize our JavaScript Library. If you are working with a developer, they can attach the trigger to specific UI elements like a button click using code snippets. This ensures that every time a visitor interacts with that element, the event is recorded in Bread and Butter instantly.


API Trigger

For custom setups or backend tracking, you can use a direct API trigger. This method involves sending a request containing your app_id  , device_id  , and the unique code of the event you created directly to our system.


Can I disable or delete events?

  • Disabling: You can uncheck an event in your list to stop tracking it without losing its historical data.
  • Deleting: You can delete an event as long as it has never been triggered. Once a user has completed that action and data has been recorded, the event cannot be deleted to ensure your historical reporting remains accurate.
Did this answer your question? Thanks for the feedback There was a problem submitting your feedback. Please try again later.